Three sisters, who were found dead under unexplained circumstances in Delhi's Mandawali area, possibly died of malnutrition or starvation, a postmortem report has said. The police were treating it as the case of natural deaths, but the recovery of pills and medicine bottles prompted them to look into the poisoning angle. The Delhi government has ordered a magisterial probe into the matter.

Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia wrote on Twitter that the victims' father, a daily wage labourer, had gone to work and hadn't returned. Their mother was mentally challenged, he said.

The girls - aged two, four and eight - were declared brought dead by a hospital on Tuesday. The girls were brought to the hospital by their mother and a neighbour at around 1 pm, the police said.

The post-mortem was conducted by a board of doctors at the GTB hospital.

A forensic team inspected the place where the family was staying and found some medicine bottles and pills, the police said.

The girls' father, who worked as a casual labourer, was missing, PTI reported.

The police wanted to ensure that there was nothing amiss in the death of the girls after the medicine bottles were recovered from their home. The post-mortem report, however, appeared to cancel that theory.

In a similar incident last year, an 11-year-old girl in Jharkhand's Simdega had allegedly died of starvation. The death had come to light after it was reported by an organisation working on food security related issues.

The girl's mother had said in a statement that her daughter died due to starvation as the family members did not get the food grains from the Public Distribution System (PDS) shop as their ration card was not linked with the Aadhaar card.